page_title: Stanisław Leszczyński
section_title: King for first time
hierarchical_section_title: Stanisław Leszczyński / King for first time
context_page_description: Stanisław I Leszczyński, also Anglicized and Latinized as Stanislaus I, was King of Poland, Grand Duke of Lithuania, Duke of Lorraine and a count of the Holy Roman Empire.
  Stanisław was born into a powerful magnate family of Greater Poland, and he had the opportunity to travel to western Europe in his youth. In 1702, King Charles XII of Sweden marched into the country during the Great Northern War. Charles forced the Polish nobility to depose Poland’s king, Augustus II the Strong, and then placed Stanisław on the throne. The early 18th century was a period of great problems and turmoil for Poland. In 1709 Charles suffered a defeat from the Russians at the Battle of Poltava and was subsequently driven into exile in the Ottoman Empire. As a result, Stanisław lost all stable support. Augustus II became King of Poland again, and Stanisław fled the country and settled in the province of Alsace, France. In 1725 his daughter Marie Leszczyńska married Louis XV of France.
  When Augustus died in 1733, Stanisław sought to regain the Polish throne with the help of French support for his candidacy.
context_section_description: The following year, Stanisław was selected by Charles XII of Sweden after a successful Swedish invasion of Poland, to supersede Augustus II, who was hostile towards the Swedes. Leszczyński was a young man of blameless antecedents, respectable talents, and came from an ancient family, but certainly without sufficient force of character or political influence to sustain himself on so unstable a throne.
  Nevertheless, with the assistance of a bribing fund and an army corps, the Swedes succeeded in procuring his election by a scratch assembly of half a dozen castellans and a few score of gentlemen on 12 July 1704. A few months later, Stanisław was forced by a sudden inroad of Augustus II to seek refuge in the Swedish camp, but finally on 24 September 1705, he was crowned king with great splendor. Charles himself supplied his nominee with a new crown and scepter in lieu of the ancient Polish regalia, which had been carried off to Saxony by August. During this time the King of Sweden sent Peter Estenberg to King Stanislaw to act as an ambassador and correspondence secretary. The Polish king's first act was to cement an alliance with Charles XII whereby the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth engaged to assist Sweden against the Russian tsar. Stanisław did what he could to assist his patron. Thus, he induced Ivan Mazepa, the Cossack hetman, to desert Peter the Great at the most critical period of the Great Northern War between Russia and Sweden, and Stanisław placed a small army corps at the disposal of the Swedes and was beaten in Battle of Koniecpol. However, Stanisław depended so entirely on the success of Charles' arms that after the Battle of Poltava (1709), his authority vanished as a dream at the first touch of reality. Stanisław then resided in the town of Rydzyna.
caption: During his first reign before 1709
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